Surveillance For Emerging Infections
Surveillance is the act of infection investigation using the CDC definitions. Determining an infection requires an Infection Control Practitioner (ICP) to review a patient's chart and see if the patient had the signs and symptom of an infection. Surveillance definition cover infections of the bloodstream, urinary tract, pneumonia, and surgical sites.
Surveillance traditionally involved significant manual data assessment and entry in order to assess preventative actions such as isolation of patients with an infectious disease. Increasingly, integrated computerised software solutions, such as Formic Fusion are becoming available that assess incoming risk messages from microbiology and other online sources. By reducing the need for data entry, this software significantly reduces the data workload of ICPs, freeing them to concentrate on clinical surveillance.
As approximately one third of healthcare acquired infections are preventable, surveillance and preventative activities are increasingly a priority for hospital staff. In the United States, a study on the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control Project (SENIC) by the CDC found that hospitals reduced their nosocomial infection rates by approximately 32 per cent by focusing on surveillance activities and prevention efforts.
Read more about this topic: Infection Control
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